Manchester Murders Shatter Yom Kippur

This Yom Kippur should have been a day of quiet reckoning. Instead, outside Manchester’s Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, a man used a car and a knife to turn worship into carnage. Two congregants — Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed; three others were grievously wounded. Security volunteers and armed officers kept the massacre from becoming worse, yet the sanctity of the day was shattered.

For British Jews, the comparison is not the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That was an attack by states on a state. This was targeted murder of citizens at prayer. It revealed not a distant conflict but a domestic failure: two years of escalating rhetoric and intimidation indulged, normalized and excused until words hardened into weapons.

The atmosphere did not appear overnight. Since Oct. 7